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What, exactly, is the role of the U.S. Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to determine. The power to declare war, long considered a crucial congressional authority, has become a murky right of the presidential office in the time since September 11; the president, in recent months, has claimed even more of that power for himself, authorizing strikes on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The power of the purse seems to have mostly been taken away from Congress too; currently, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also defaulted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to cancel congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the money to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be crammed into spending packages, huge recurring essential comprehensive bills that can circumvent the senate obstruction. But when those don’t pass – and increasingly, they don’t – the federal government just ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration shut down – and it’s not clear how many people notice. Currently, the government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the presidency continues operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can appear somewhat irrelevant. Why should Americans care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely rendered itself powerless?

How ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist California’s Proposition 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could provide five additional House seats to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by the electorate in a upcoming vote next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. In part, it is a belated reaction to developments occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted extreme partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and the Evergreen State create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an imbalance that has resulted in narrowly split House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California measure is explicitly intended as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented maps that will provide the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following the state’s example in attempting to redistrict.)

The state measure seems probable to pass, as Democratic and liberal voters respond with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to check his most extreme impulses. But Prop 50 is not free from debate. Some opponents caution that the action could backfire, with blue states’ attempts to redistrict triggering a revenge cycle in which red states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic grounds: a district that is drawn in such a manner that the outcome of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the influence of opposing voices is muted, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a functioning democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is worth taking each of these objections on their merits. The first argument, that the measure will spur conservatives to redraw their own districts in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to claim that Republicans will be made to act in undemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to change boundaries that guarantee long-term seats for their party: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second critique, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of sad desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has turned into. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, it is believed, yearn for and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not mandated by our circumstances. It is not good to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is harmful for elected officials to choose their constituents, instead of the reverse; it is negative that elections are rendered noncompetitive. That these measures have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic creep of the president’s power and lessen the amount of harm he is able to cause is unfortunate; it is a sign of how much we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are necessary. Only once the fight against Trumpism has been won that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.

If the legislative branch does not in reality have lawmaking, military or budgetary authority, what is it, exactly, that the proposition’s additional five Democratic representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant politics and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that power to significant impact. In the coming years, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are take office, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his conduct and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer